Implement auto-scaling of resources

Use case:

I have a $10/month VPS and one of my blog posts gets posted to Hacker News and Slashdot. My server sees a huge spike in traffic. This is okay because Digital Ocean has automatic resource scaling and they will bump me to a higher plan (with more ram, cpu, etc) for as long as my server needs the extra resources to handle the requests. When my blog post dies down, I return to my $10/month plan and I get charged based on the amount of hours I needed to use the larger plan.

Admin Response

We are gathering information about autoscaling needs, especially given the introduction of our Load Balancer product. Your feedback is welcome, especially if you can describe your use case and tools you are using to automate workload deployments.

We do not have any plans currently to implement auto-scaling mainly because there are two issues.

One is that auto-scaling a particular droplet depends on the service that is running, whereby many customers that use it to run their DB + web server may not want to incur a 2-3 minute downtime while it is being resized.

The second is that alot of this can be achieved through a distributed layout of your application with open source tools like puppet and chef where new web nodes are launched automatically through our API.